


Requiem

by Ladybug_21



Category: Amadeus (1984), Phantom of the Opera - Lloyd Webber
Genre: But I Find Her Really Interesting Regardless, Carlotta Is Truly Awful, Emotional/Psychological Abuse, Haunting, Not A Happy Ending, Obsession, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-12
Updated: 2019-01-12
Packaged: 2019-09-23 03:13:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 6
Words: 17,831
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17072432
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ladybug_21/pseuds/Ladybug_21
Summary: Carlotta Giudicelli has it all: talent, fame, and (now that the Opera Ghost has finally disappeared) the uncontested adoration of the Parisian public. But the prima donna of the Opéra Populaire does not forgive or forget past humiliations easily. And so she makes it her mission to destroy the one soprano who has ever stood between her and the spotlight.Inspired by the Peter Shaffer playAmadeus.





	1. Day of Wrath

**Author's Note:**

> I have plenty of friends who assume that Carlotta is a truly terrible singer, as well as narcissistic and fat and (if the Phantom's second note is to be believed) not all that good at acting. While I certainly won't contest the narcissistic bit — divas will be divas — I will point out that Carlotta's role in the ALW musical is MUCH harder to sing than Christine's from a technical standpoint. As a result, my headcanon for Carlotta is that, while she's often a very unpleasant person, she's actually quite a GOOD singer; and I also like to imagine that she's a reasonably compelling performer and a fairly attractive woman (if curvier than the typical Christine). This all would mean that she's a very legitimate rival for Christine, and someone who deserved her position with the Opéra Populaire from a purely talent-based standpoint, which I frankly think makes her much more interesting than the alternative.
> 
> Otherwise, if you haven't seen Peter Shaffer's masterful play  _Amadeus_ , or the exquisite 1986 Miloš Forman film adaptation of the same name, I highly recommend checking it out. Not only will it explain a lot about this fic, but it's a fantastic (if historically questionable) portrayal of jealousy and genius, set to a soundtrack of some of the best music ever written. I also feel like certain aspects of the extremely unhealthy relationship between the Marquise de Merteuil and Cécile de Volanges from  _Les Liaisons Dangereuses_  have crept into the Carlotta-Christine dynamic in this fic, so here's a shout-out to Choderlos de Laclos for some inspiration, as well.
> 
> All creative rights belong to mostly Andrew Lloyd Webber and Charles Hart, although I suppose that Gaston Leroux deserves some credit, too.

_Dies iræ, dies illa_  
_Solvet sæclum in favilla_  
_Teste David cum Sybilla._

_Quantus tremor est futurus,_  
_Quando Judex est venturus,  
_ _Cuncta stricte discussurus!_

* * *

The clouds were lowering above Paris, dark and seething and promising thunder, as her carriage clattered to a halt on the paving stones before the church. Even from the vantage point of the street, it was clear that the pews inside the church were crowded; and more monochrome figures pressed onto the pavement outside, black umbrellas clutched in their hands, a low buzz of anticipation running amongst them. Head held high, she stepped from the carriage, lifting her black satin skirts so that they did not trail in the muck and piss and horse dung oozing in the gutter. The crowd took a collective breath as it registered her arrival.

"La Carlotta," they whispered, nudging and pointing. "Yes, look there, she's entering the church now!"

Carlotta Giudicelli was accustomed to having thousands stare at her all at once, so she did what seemed the appropriate thing, and granted the crowd a solemn nod from behind her veil. Those assembled voiced their approval of this spontaneous gesture. (They shouldn't have been surprised. They  _were_  her audience, after all. She had been catering to their tastes for years now.)

The whispers remained outside the church when Carlotta entered. Inside, it was cool and dark and hushed, filled with the musty scents of burning incense and dust. The people seated in the pews also turned their heads at her entrance, but they were the dignified élite of Paris and merely nodded to her, or else turned away entirely.

André and Firmin had saved her a seat near the front of the church. She walked slowly and respectfully up the aisle, her eyes lowered. The heels of her shoes tapped an even rhythm along the polished stone floors; without consciously realizing it, she had slowed her gait to match the somber tempo of the organ music drifting down from the pipes above the congregation. When she reached the front of the church, she sank to one knee with her head lowered — an exaggeration of the curtsey that she typically made at the final curtain — and crossed herself. Finally, she raised her eyes to the shadowy crucifix hanging above the altar.

_Why?_  she asked it silently.  _Why did you let this happen?_

As soon as the managers had filed back into their seats in the pew after Carlotta, an excited cry arose from the crowd outside, loud enough that even those within the sepulchral stillness of the church could hear it. As everyone craned their necks around to see what had caused the fuss, even the pews filled with the hiss of whispers:

"It's Christine Daaé!"

"Christine Daaé, here, with the Vicomte de Chagny!"

"I hear she was  _onstage_  with him when he died..."

"I hear her  _lover_  did it..."

"Her  _lover_?!"

"Not the Vicomte — the  _Phantom_!"

"I'd thought the Phantom was a myth, until all of this..."

"Well, myth or not, what now will La Carlotta, her rival, do?"

Carlotta stiffened in shock, and sat frozen for the few seconds that it took her to recover. Then her face broke into a snarl, and she was halfway to her feet when André laid a restraining hand on her arm.

"Let go of me!" she hissed, trying to wrench her arm away.

"Signora,  _please_ ," he muttered to her, his eyes serious. "For Signor Piangi's sake."

" _F_ _or_   _Signor Piangi's sake_?!" Carlotta snarled, loudly enough that the people around her turned around in alarm. "If not for  _her_ , he would still be alive!"

Madame Giry, who was sitting in the next pew back and attired in her usual black, leaned forward slightly.

"And if you storm over to Christine Daaé right now, and scream at her and her fiancé to get out, what do you think will be the lead story in all of the evening papers?" she murmured with quiet urgency. "Certainly nothing commemorating Signor Piangi."

Carlotta could have spat in the ballet mistress's gaunt face. The managers at least had been on her side until they were terrorized into submission by the opera house's resident masked lunatic. But Madame Giry had always been against her, always pushing for Christine Daaé to take the limelight, always urging the opera house personnel to comply meekly with the will of the deranged Phantom. Still, the awful woman had a point. Carlotta had spent most of Ubaldo Piangi's life outshining him in every way possible; she owed it to him not to outshine his death, as well.

With a scowl, Carlotta turned back around and sat, so slowly and deliberately that she could feel the managers holding their breaths until she was physically seated once more in her pew. The Vicomte de Chagny and the erstwhile star of the Opéra Populaire, meanwhile, had taken their seats and were politely waiting for the ceremony to commence. Carlotta had just enough time before the priest appeared to come to the crushing realization that the crowds outside had not assembled to mourn the fallen tenor, but merely to gawk at the spectacle of his passing and swap rumors about its circumstances.

The funeral, for all its somber pomp, was predictably uninspired. It left Carlotta plenty of time to think, while the priest droned on and on, and the church choir sang bits and pieces of the Berlioz Requiem to the reedy puttering of the organ. (Carlotta knew that Ubaldo, as a fervent nationalist when it came to music, would have preferred Verdi to Berlioz, but the choir had only just learned the latter and wanted to show it off. She suspected that they wouldn't have done justice to the greatest of the Italian composers, anyway.)

If Carlotta was honest with herself, she hadn't even liked Ubaldo Piangi all that much. He was dull, pompous, and arrogant as the day is long — the sort of tenor who had risen to prominence by virtue of being inescapably loud, rather than because he possessed any any actual musical skill. As a partner onstage, he was anything but generous; the same held for his performance as a lover, the few times she had made that mistake. Yet she would miss him. He had not been an attractive man, by any means, and his vanity far outpaced both his looks and his intellectual abilities; but there was something about Ubaldo's brash confidence that she had always found comforting. The façade of self-importance and bravado that she had to work so hard to maintain had been for Ubaldo not a façade, but a simple reality.

Plus, Ubaldo had adored Carlotta. He had never been introspective enough to realize how much space he tried to take up onstage, just as he had never been perceptive enough to realize how little space he actually did. But some small part of his slow brain had been just gentlemanly enough that he had always offered Carlotta genuine courtesies, even while then doing his meager utmost to steal the show from her. As Carlotta had always known that the show was always firmly in her palm, she had let Ubaldo think himself grander than he was, and meanwhile allowed herself to be charmed by his clumsy gallantry. Even when the managers had wavered in the face of the Phantom's threats, Ubaldo had remained immovably at her side. Whether this had been due to national pride, or indignation at his own treatment, or perhaps sheer force of habit, Carlotta would never truly know; but she liked to believe that Ubaldo's loyalty was driven at least in part by admiration.

They had been a team for years, after all. A lopsided team, admittedly, but a team, nonetheless: two foreigners out to conquer the hearts of the discriminating Parisian public.

And now she was alone.

The service ended, and the mourning-clad crowds began to disperse slowly out the front of the church. The managers, their wives clinging to their arms like the social accessories that they were, shook hands and accepted condolences. Carlotta stood haughtily by their side, her chin raised but her eyes lowered, so that passers-by did not really expect to be acknowledged as they murmured words of sorrow. She remained that way until the Vicomte de Chagny and his flighty little fiancée had the audacity to approach the managers.

"Vicomte, Miss Daaé," muttered Firmin with a slight bow. "I hope you've been well?"

"Well enough, thank you," replied the Vicomte with a nod. "Terribly sorry about all of this, of course."

"Yes, well, that's very kind of you," answered André with a sad, strangled laugh.

Christine turned abruptly to Carlotta, who was standing still as stone, almost as if she hoped that the couple would mistake her for a statue.

"He was a good man," Christine said earnestly, clutching the Vicomte's arm. "We'll miss hearing him sing very much."

Carlotta shot the other soprano a chilly sidelong glance. Christine was giving her a twitchy, tentative smile, her eyes as enormous and innocent as always. She was still so young, not very much more than a child, and hardly larger than one. It suddenly struck Carlotta that this slip of a girl wore an expression not entirely unlike other admiring young musicians — children of less than twenty years of age, who still had their whole lives and careers ahead of them, and who looked upon Carlotta as a fascinating but passé relic of the operatic stage.

Carlotta could have slapped Christine. Instead, she decided to kill her with kindness.

"Ubaldo would have been  _so_  honored by your attendance," she purred, taking Christine's hands in her own. "It is incredibly kind of you to have come today."

"We've missed you, at the opera house," André volunteered awkwardly.

"Although we hope you've been quite happy in your, er, new life," Firmin added, glancing quickly at the Vicomte to ensure that no offense had been taken. (None had.)

"And it's only a pity that we did not know you would be here!" Carlotta exclaimed. "We could have insisted on a piece with a soprano solo for you to sing."

"For me?" Christine stammered, a flush rising to her porcelain-like cheeks. "But, Signora, I would have thought that you...?"

"Ah, no," replied Carlotta gravely, laying a hand delicately on her bosom. "I have raised my voice many times in honor of the dead, Miss Daaé, but never for a friend taken through such violence. I do not know if I could have risen to the task."

Christine's hand quivered in Carlotta's, and the older soprano detected a parallel tremor in the young girl's lower lip. Carlotta did not expect an apology, but it was satisfying nonetheless to know that something like one had at least crossed Christine Daaé's mind.

"You'll have to make your swan song some other time," she told Christine with a smile that was almost genuine.

"Oh, no," mumbled Christine, dropping her eyes modestly. "Those days are past."

She withdrew her hand from Carlotta's and returned it to the arm of her betrothed.

"We'll look forward to seeing you perform soon, Signora," the Vicomte gallantly offered. "Until then, gentlemen?"

As the managers took their turns praising their patron's generosity, Christine turned once more towards Carlotta.

"Signora, I know that we have had our differences in the past," she said shyly. "But I do hope that we can one day be friends?"

_When Hell freezes over_ , Carlotta thought viciously.

"As do I," she answered aloud.

Christine responded with a radiant smile that would have melted ice. Carlotta knew that her heart must have hardened into stone when she realized that she nonetheless felt nothing but contempt.


	2. Marveling at the Resurgent

_Tuba mirum spargens sonum,_  
_Per sepulchra regionum,_  
_Coget omnes ante thronum._

 _Mors stupebit et natura,_  
_Cum resurget creatura,_  
_Judicanti responsura._

* * *

Somehow, incredibly, life went on at the Opéra Populaire.

Of course, things were not as they had been before Ubaldo Piangi's untimely demise and the Phantom's disappearance. The latter factor at least had worked to the advantage of the company, from a morale standpoint. Stagehands now walked the catwalks of the theater with confidence, and the ballet girls no longer tittered to each other in dizzy terror over movements in the shadows. The new chandelier shone overhead, still too fresh to have collected much grime over the year since its installation. But even as the chorus edged around their resident  _prima donna_  as gingerly as always, afraid to upset her unnecessarily in the midst of rehearsal, Carlotta now sensed an overwhelming degree of pity tinting their unease. She wished everyone else would work as hard as she was at trying to forget the past and rebuild, at trying to replace everything that had been lost.

For things had been lost. Carlotta may not have been overly fond of her former leading man, but Ubaldo Piangi had been a draw for audiences; if there was one thing he could do notoriously well, it was blare crystal-clear high Cs as loud as a horn, all evening long. And for all the hype and fascination, the recent violence at the opera house had put dents in the levels of attendance. The Parisian élite, it appeared, would flock to the site of a juicy scandal, as long as doing so did not entail the twin risks of witnessing homicide and courting death by loosed lighting fixture. She knew that the managers had had a devil of a time coaxing the audiences back after the first disaster, and that they would have an equally hard time doing so now.

More importantly, Carlotta had her own reckonings to consider.

"Brooding again?" asked Fritz, dropping cheerfully into the chair next to her.

Carlotta looked up and sniffed, trying to be irritated with her new leading man, and finding it impossible to keep up the pretense. Friedrich Hirsch was as irrepressibly charming as his predecessor had been dull and self-centered; he was tall and handsome, with a shock of wavy blond hair and a winning grin. Carlotta sensed that all of Paris would soon be swooning over the new tenor's voice, which was as golden and ethereal as his striking appearance — but, oddly enough, she didn't mind. Fritz knew  _exactly_  how good-looking and talented he was, and because of that, he was one of the most emotionally secure and overall gracious singers that Carlotta had ever met. (She had long since gotten over the disappointing realization that Fritz was far more interested in the top hat-wearing portion of the audience than in its fan-carrying counterpart, which at least meant that she would not need to worry about stupid romantic entanglements with her stage partner in the near future.)

"Not brooding," she replied sourly. "Contemplating the nature of vengeance."

" _Vendetta, tremenda vendetta!_ " Fritz sang in his best impersonation of a baritone, and then laughed. "Ah,  _poverina mia_ , is there anything that I can do for you, other than to sit here booming Verdi in your direction?"

"Stop mutilating my native tongue, perhaps?" muttered Carlotta, still doing her best to be cross.

"My Italian is quite good, thank you very much," said Fritz, who had grown up along the Austrian-Italian border. "What, exactly, has driven you to thoughts of revenge?"

Carlotta scowled at him.

"You've heard, I presume, about the pending marriage of the Vicomte de Chagny to one Christine Daaé?"

"Who in this city has not?" Fritz sat back in his chair and crossed his legs. "I hear tell that she gave  _you_  a run for your money, before she got engaged and retired from this glamorous world of ours."

"I would  _not_  put it that way," Carlotta sniffed.

"Well, I probably wouldn't, either," Fritz winked, and when Carlotta arched an eyebrow at him, he clarified: " _Cara mia_ , just  _look_  at her. Unless she's remarkably different onstage than off, I'm guessing she spent most of her operatic career sounding very delicate and pretty, and appearing equally so, in a sort of frail, enormous-eyed, rail-thin manner."

"If only we all could be tiny, pale, teenage ballerinas with bell-like voices," Carlotta sighed bitterly.

"If every one of you sopranos were, the world would be a horrifying place for the rest of us," Fritz reminded her cheerily. "You may be nearly two decades older than Miss Daaé, but those are two decades to your  _advantage_ , Signora; you've developed a presence that dwarfs hers, however lovely her arias and ballet solos may have been. And the audience knows it, from what I hear... word around the wings is that the public has flown back to your side the instant you've decided to return to the stage, all three times you've left."

That much was true. The Parisian opera-goers had flocked to Christine as a novelty, then enthusiastically received Carlotta once more, as soon as the managers had talked her back into a costume. Unlike the opera house's administration, they had continued to wish her success when it became clear that Carlotta, and not Christine, was the real underdog in this battle for the limelight. She knew that they loved her as much as she needed to be adored.

Which was why it was all the more humiliating that she had ever been displaced in the first place.

On some level, Carlotta knew that it wasn't Christine's fault. The Swedish soubrette would never have had the chance (or perhaps even the inclination) to steal the spotlight away, were it not for the fact that she was being manipulated by the theater's erstwhile in-house terrorist. But the Phantom was gone, and  _someone_  had to pay for the destruction left in his chaotic wake. Surely some divine justice would punish Christine for being an accomplice to so much wrong, and Carlotta's own indignities were only the start of a very long list of sins.

"You still look angry," Fritz told her. "Maybe what you need is a good distraction."

"Oh?" Carlotta scoffed. "Such as?"

"Well, my former patron from Vienna will be arriving in a few days, to stay for the rest of the month," Fritz shrugged. "He's a count, and he's devilishly handsome, and he  _adores_  opera. He's planning to come to the opening night of  _Faust_ , and if you like what you see, I can certainly arrange an, er, introduction, shall we say."

"Hmm." Carlotta uncrossed her arms and sat up a little straighter. "And I take it that he is not one for skinny ballerina girls with no personality?"

"Oh, quite the opposite," Fritz assured her. "He much prefers interesting and opinionated women with a few curves."

"Good," said Carlotta.

The opening night of  _Faust_  was a rousing success. It was the Opéra Populaire's first production since the disastrous première of  _Don Juan Triumphant_ , and the managers had thrown everything they had had into its promotion, down to several public reassurances that the company's new tenor was indisputably Austrian (the War of 1870 was still fresh enough in the minds of the French that it had soured them generally on all things Prussian).

More importantly, it was vindication for Carlotta. The audiences had turned out in droves, and they had cheered as loudly for her at the final curtain as they had for Fritz. He was their new golden boy, but she was the star that they had nurtured for so long, and she knew that she had done their confidence proud. She was back on top of the world of Parisian sopranos, with no immediate challengers in sight for miles.

As she took bow after bow, roses accumulating at her feet when adoring audience members managed to toss them all the way over the orchestra pit, Carlotta glanced up at the boxes, beaming. To her surprise, the Vicomte de Chagny and Christine Daaé were applauding politely from Box Six.

"I saw your friend Miss Daaé in the audience," she said when she encountered Meg Giry in the wing through which she was trying to exit. "She was so close, it felt like she should have been onstage with us."

"Oh, yes," gasped Meg Giry, clearly flabbergasted as to why La Carlotta was talking to her. "The Vicomte apparently became very fond of his seat in Box Five, but Christine didn't want to sit there — for reasons that I'm sure you understand — so he did the next best thing and purchased the box exactly opposite for the season. Clever, don't you think?"

"Clever, indeed," murmured Carlotta. "Well, if you see her, please tell Miss Daaé that I'm honored that she attended."

"Of course, Signora," giggled Meg, and off she ran with some of her ballet friends.

Carlotta stood in the wing for a few seconds longer, frowning, and then went back to her dressing room to change for the gala immediately following.

The gala was everything one would have expected of such an event: silks, diamonds, shoes shined to a gleaming finish, tailcoats, lace, feathers, all whisking across the marbled floors of the foyer on the frames of the crème de la crème of Parisian society. Champagne was poured; laughter was high; praise was effusive. Carlotta quickly located Fritz's bright hair across the way and made her way over to his side.

" _La bella regina di questa notte!_ " he greeted her, seizing her hand and kissing it elaborately. "Let me introduce you to my great friend and former benefactor, Count Christoph Maria Carl Richard von Weber. And, in turn, a friend who needs no introduction: La Carlotta."

" _Enchanté_ ," replied the Count, bowing respectfully. He was indeed handsome, as dark as Fritz was fair. "Beautiful singing tonight, Signora. It was an honor to hear you."

"And an honor to perform," Carlotta replied. "I must ask... von Weber? Not related to the composer?"

"Ah, yes," laughed the Count sheepishly, "related, but lacking in all associated musical talent."

"Not true; he has excellent taste in singers," Fritz editorialized in a stage whisper to Carlotta.

The Count huffed a small sigh of fond exasperation at his former employee.

"Fritz, my good man, there's a gaggle of fans over in that corner of the foyer; are you quite sure you wouldn't like to go make their evenings by talking to them for a bit?"

"Certainly, Your Lordship," replied Fritz, winking at Carlotta as he turned on his heel and headed towards the gaggle in question.

This left Carlotta very much alone with the dashing Count, and after exchanging a bit more small talk, the two came to an unspoken agreement that they might as well disappear from the gala sooner rather than later, and get what they really wanted from one another. A short carriage ride later, followed by a lengthy tumble in the silken sheets of the Count's hotel room bed, and Carlotta was well-satisfied with life; it had been far too long since she'd had a proper affair with anyone fabulously rich and ever so statuesque. A decadent end to an already triumphant evening, she thought to herself, as the pair caught their breaths between exertions.

"You really were exquisite, you know," the Count murmured into her hair in German.

"So you think you'll come again?" she asked him.

"Every performance, so long as I'm in Paris," he answered, before he registered his error and switched back into French. "I wouldn't have expected an Italian working in France to speak any German."

"I was born in the Kingdom of Lombardy-Venetia," Carlotta shrugged. "When I was a little girl, we were all as much subjects of the Habsburg crown as you are."

"So!" He smiled in delight. "Where in Lombardy-Venetia did you grow up?"

"Legnago. It's very small. Its only real claim to fame is that it is also the hometown of the great composer Antonio Salieri."

The Count flopped back onto his pillows and laughed.

"What's so funny?" Carlotta demanded.

"Oh, it's all just interesting irony," the Count replied. "I'm related by marriage to Mozart, too, you know; his wife Constanze was born a Weber."

"And?"

The Count tilted his head quizzically.

"Did you not grow up with the rumors?" When Carlotta merely shrugged, he continued: "Perhaps it's just that we Viennese enjoy intrigue and scandal a bit more than we should, but musicians who visit our fair capital inevitably end up surrounded by whispers that Salieri, in a fit of jealous rage, murdered Mozart."

"No!"

"Some suggest poison. And others speculate that maybe Salieri didn't  _murder_  him, but drove him mad, nonetheless," the Count clarified. "Commissioned from Mozart his famous requiem mass, incognito, and Mozart was so convinced that he was writing music for his own funeral that he grew ill and died in the middle of composing the piece. Or, as a variation on the same theme, my music tutor used to speculate that Mozart was convinced that the figure who commissioned the mass was the ghost of his recently deceased father, Leopold. You get the idea."

"Not a terribly likely story," Carlotta sniffed. "In fact, it's so outlandish that it sounds like the plot of an opera."

"Well, Pushkin  _did_  write a play about it, for what it's worth." The Count pulled Carlotta to him and began to kiss the nape of her neck. "But no more talk of darkness and death. The living should focus on living, no?"

Carlotta agreed, of course. But later that night, she lay staring out the window at the starry night sky, the Count breathing softly behind her in his sleep, and her thoughts were filled with a fire that burned cold and inanimate as the stars outside.


	3. King of Fearful Majesty

_Rex tremendæ majestatis,_  
_Qui salvandos salvas gratis,_  
_Salva me, fons pietatis._

* * *

What Christine Saw.

The new production of  _Faust_  thundered to a laureled conclusion, and next on the Opéra Populaire's season was a  _Rigoletto_ that the critics received with equal gusto. Raoul insisted that they attend, but Christine's heart was not entirely in the endeavor. She knew that he was trying to prove to her that the opera house was once again safe, that they had exorcised all of their demons. She knew that, objectively, he was right. Christine had always been easily spooked by the ghastly tales that Raoul had spun when they were fanciful children on a beach, telling each other dark stories of the north. She had always insisted on keeping a light on when she went to sleep, until Raoul finally sat her down and explained very calmly and rationally that there were no ghosts in her father's cozy, music-filled house — or at least none whose wrath Christine could possibly have incurred.

But everything had changed. Christine now knew that one could attract the attention of a specter without intending to do so. She also now knew that the attentions of men could be far, far more perilous than those of ghosts.

Most of all, she now knew that a ghost did not have to be present for a space to still be haunted.

To her surprise, it wasn't purely her superstitions that had made her so miserable throughout three hours of Gounod performed admittedly very well. It was also the fact that Box Six was so very close to the stage. From a greater distance, she might have been able to pretend that the show was some lovely but totally inaccessible panorama, but there was no opportunity for such illusion at this proximity. Christine could see the precise color of the good luck ribbons with which Meg had tied back her hair; she could see the fashionable birthmark that Claudette had added to her left cheek with a dab of makeup; she could practically count La Carlotta's teeth whenever the soprano hit a high note. And all the while, Christine had wanted nothing more than to fall from the box onto the stage, back into the swirling colors and surging adrenaline of the operatic world.

(But of course she couldn't do such a thing, not with Raoul clutching her hand so earnestly in their box. Besides, this was the choice that she had made, when she had agreed to marry him. She knew that she would have to give all of this up, and she didn't regret it, mostly. Still, having been trained from her birth onwards to believe that performance was survival — that art was how one sustained oneself in every sense — Christine felt like she was on the verge of slipping into a terrifying void of purposelessness when she awoke every morning and was not required to take to the stage, or to do anything else. Anything besides, of course, to go to the opera with her fiancé and be seen as the future Vicomtesse de Chagny; and so that was what Christine did.)

A few days before the opening night of  _Rigoletto_ , Christine had made her way back over to the Opéra Populaire. She slipped in through the back door that the stagehands and dancers used, and tiptoed through the dusty spaces backstage, knocking into stray props that hadn't been pushed all the way to the side of the corridors, careful not to touch the walls in case any of the enormous canvas backdrops were still wet with paint. Down the hallways, she could hear Madame Giry shouting steps at her dancers, over the discordant banging of the perpetually out-of-tune piano in the rehearsal room.

For an insane moment, Christine wanted to dash into the rehearsal room, tear off her fine new dress and gloves and hat and mink stole, and take her place at the barre with her friends. She swayed a bit, unsteady, her eyes clouding with tears at how close her world was, and yet how impossibly far away. Part of her wanted nothing more than to rush into the arms of Madame Giry when the rehearsal was over, and sob to her surrogate mother that even though she knew she was blessed to be engaged to a fine man whose love she reciprocated, it somehow wasn't enough. But Christine knew how stern the ballet mistress could be, and she knew the odds of receiving sympathy were about even with the odds of receiving a scolding for her ingratitude. Given how cross Madame Giry sounded with respect to the ballet corps' rehearsal, Christine decided that the latter possibility was more likely, and so she quietly made her way back to the stage door, and out into the clear light of a winter afternoon in Paris. Her face was streaked with silent tears by the time she reached the Palais de Chagny, but all of the servants simply turned away to mind their own business upon her entrance, and Christine quietly crept back to her suite, invisible.

Three nights later, Raoul put on his top hat and his tail coat, and he offered Christine his arm down to the waiting carriage that would take them to the opera. Arm entwined with Raoul's arm, she descended the carriage in the drive before the illuminated opera house, walked slowly across the lobby with whispers of admiration crackling all around her, climbed the sweeping staircase so that her new dress and new jewels and perfectly coiffed hair were all on full display, and finally took her seat at the edge of her box, feeling rather helpless about everything. The sound of the orchestra tuning usually cheered her, but tonight the thin tone of the oboe that gave the rest of the pit its A sounded more mournful than anticipatory. From the moment the lights dimmed and the applause began for M. Lefèvre's entrance, Christine felt that the evening took on a somewhat somnambular quality, something suspended more in dreams than in reality.

What Christine saw were painted faces in sumptuous costumes, singing and dancing at a ball, their revelry marred by the threats of a bitter, deformed man. What Christine saw was the vengeful leveling of a curse that would drive the destruction of the rest of the principal characters in the story. What Christine saw was an innocent young girl falling wildly in love with a man whose true name she did not even know, and then that same young girl abducted by her disguised beloved. By the time the curtain fell on the first act, she was so dazed that Raoul took notice and insisted that she use the intermission to get some fresh air.

It was what Christine saw during the second act, however, that made her faint.

Christine noticed sometime just after the intermission that someone was sitting in Box Five, a stranger whose attention was very intently focused on the theatrical goings-on. Her stomach had done an odd flip-flop upon seeing him there; it wasn't as though the opera house was  _required_  to keep the box empty forever, but it was unexpectedly painful to be handed such tangible proof that the Phantom was truly gone. Disappointed, she tried to keep her eyes turned towards the stage, away from the occupied box, but halfway through the act, her attention was caught by a slice of light that blinked from the cracked doorway in the back wall. She saw the silhouette of a figure slip in through the door of the box, backlit by the comparative brightness of the hallway behind, and once it had closed the door quietly enough that the box's occupant had not noticed any disturbance, it slowly edged forward from the shadows into the glow cast by the stage.

Christine was halfway to her feet before she realized what she was doing.

"NO!" she screamed at the figure opposite, her hand outstretched as though she could bridge the width of the theater.

And then everything went black.

Christine came to on a chaise-longue in one of the parlours of the opera house. Madame Giry was holding smelling salts under her nose, and when she saw that Christine was awake, she rose to her feet and laid a protective hand over the future Vicomtesse's brow.

"How is she?" fretted Raoul from across the room.

"She'll be fine," declared Madame Giry, smiling down at Christine. But as she pulled her palm from Christine's forehead, Christine seized her hand.

"May I speak with you? Alone?" she whispered urgently.

Madame Giry glanced back over her shoulder at Raoul, bewildered, but gave Christine a reassuring nod and gently disengaged her hand.

"M'sieur le Vicomte," she said quietly to Raoul, "wouldn't you like to go back in?"

"But..." Raoul furrowed his brow. "But what about Christine?"

"Miss Daaé will need to lie still for a bit, after getting so excited," Madame Giry explained. "I am happy to stay with her, as I have already seen the opera at all stages of rehearsal. And everyone will find it reassuring if you reappear and can explain during the intermission that your fiancée is feeling unwell but is in no danger. It will stave off any rumors spreading wildly out of hand."

"I see. Thank you, then." Raoul smiled over at Christine, then stepped forward and took her hand. "Would you mind, my dear?"

Christine shook her head, and Raoul kissed her on the forehead and stepped out of the room.

The instant the door clicked shut, Christine burst into tears, and Madame Giry sat down on the edge of the chaise-longue and gathered the trembling girl in her arms.

"I saw him," Christine sobbed. " _I saw him_ ; he was trying to go back to his seat in Box Five."

"Shh," said Madame Giry soothingly, stroking Christine's hair like she used to when Christine was just a wisp of an orphan and had had yet another of her frequent bad dreams. "He's gone, my child. You must know that he is."

"No," Christine insisted, shaking her head. "He was here, tonight. They were all wrong. He isn't gone. He  _can't_  be gone."

"My dear girl," sighed Madame Giry, "don't think that I don't care. Don't think that I don't  _understand_. But if he were still here, I would know."

"Perhaps not," Christine snapped at Madame Giry. "He didn't tell you  _everything_."

"That's true," conceded Madame Giry somewhat stonily, after a prolonged pause. "But you seem to underestimate the strength of his trust in me. He may not have told me  _everything_ , but he always certainly told me  _enough_."

Christine struggled from the ballet mistress's arms and threw herself onto the chaise-longue with her back towards Madame Giry, who sighed, placed a hand on Christine's shoulder, and heavily stood.

"Would you like me to stay with you while you rest?" she asked. "Or would you prefer to be alone?"

"Alone, please," answered Christine in a tearful voice, her face still buried in the back cushions of the chaise-longue.

Madame Giry nodded, then quietly let herself out of the parlour.

Christine lay on the chaise-longue for some time longer, her mind awhirl with emotions that were too complex for her to parse. Finally, she pushed herself to a seated position, then slowly to her feet. As if in a trance, she made her way to the door, then down the hallway, and through a door to the backstage of the opera house.

Most of the ensemble had already left for the evening, dismissed after their only appearances in the opera's first scene. Virtually everyone else seemed to be either onstage or waiting in the wings for their entrance in Act Three, so Christine was able to make her way through the backstage area unnoticed. The famous quartet echoed distantly from the stage, but Christine barely noticed. She could not fathom why she had stolen back here, what she could possibly prove to herself. She did not even know if she wanted the Phantom to be waiting for her, or not. Anticipation and terror and longing mingled together in an intoxicating sweetness.

Christine did not even notice that her steps had led her to her old dressing room, until the moment she arrived.

With a hesitant breath, she placed a hand on the handle of the door, which was ever so slightly ajar and pushed open easily. Her eyes could see nothing within the dimness of the unlit dressing room, but her breath caught nonetheless from a familiar whirring tinkle. As her eyes adjusted to the light, she could tell that nothing had been moved since her departure from the Opéra Populaire: all of her old costumes hung on the rack; all of her makeup was still strewn across vanity; the glass of the mirror on the wall remained shattered, littering the floor with glistening shards. Christine walked slowly towards the yawning hole in the glass and peered through, into the darkness of the tunnel beyond.

The little music box, its automaton monkey doggedly clapping its cymbals together, sat just within the frame of the former mirror, as if it had recently ascended from the darkness and was waiting for her. It chimed its old tune slower and slower as she picked it up and its mechanism whirred to a halt. Christine took an unsteady step backwards, her breath coming in quick gasps, then collapsed into a chair, her eyes wide as she stared at the music box in her lap. Then the world went dark again.

This time, when Christine came to on another chaise-longue, she was in a different dressing room, one well-lit and stuffily filled with the expected scents of perfumes and flowers and stale sweat still lingering in the armpits of costumes. Her mind was sluggishly muddling through things when La Carlotta swept through the door, flushed and carrying a large box of chocolates in one hand.

"You're awake!" remarked the soprano, setting the chocolates down on her dressing room table.

"Signora," Christine murmured in reply. "What am I doing here?"

"I could ask you the same thing," Carlotta answered, sitting down on the end of the chaise-longue. She had already changed out of her costume, which Christine took to mean that the opera was over. "I was coming back to my dressing room after the final curtain call, when I saw the door to  _your_  old dressing room wide open, and when I looked inside..."

Christine shuddered.

"I've had a message sent to your box," Carlotta added. "Your fiancé will want to know where you are."

"When you found me, Signora," Christine asked hesitantly, "did you see anything odd?"

"Odd?" repeated Carlotta. "Other than your unconscious form draped over a chair, you mean?"

"No, I just thought..." Christine did not know what she thought. "I need to go back."

"To your old dressing room?  _Ma perché_? Haven't you had enough excitement for one evening? You should lie down until the Vicomte arrives..."

"Thank you, Signora," said Christine, getting to her feet a touch too hastily and steadying herself with a hand to the wall. "I'll be back to meet Raoul when he arrives."

She made her way carefully back to her old dressing room. The music box was nowhere to be seen. But when she peered into the shattered mirror again, she saw a single red rose, next to a letter bordered in black. The paper quivered in her hand as she rose to her feet, the familiar handwriting that spelled out her name shuddering as if it had a life of its own.

"Christine?"

Christine quickly crumpled the letter in one hand as she turned and smiled perfunctorily at Raoul, whose silhouette was framed by the doorway.

"Darling, I don't understand," he said as she stepped forward and took his arm. "First, I leave you with Madame Giry; then, I receive a note from La Carlotta that she's found you backstage; and now here you are, in your old dressing room, and I haven't any idea what to make of it all. Is something wrong?"

Raoul was leading her back into the world of the Parisian public, where she would need to be composed and gracious and polite. She nodded her thanks to Carlotta as they passed in the last few moments that she would spend in the shelter of the Opéra Populaire's dim backstage for who knew how long.

"I'm just still feeling a bit unwell," she told Raoul. "I must have taken a wrong turn trying to find my way back to the box, and got lost backstage. It won't happen again."

And with that, they walked back into the dazzling lights of the opera house's foyer, the Phantom's letter still crumpled discreetly in Christine's hand.

* * *

What Carlotta Saw.

She could not  _imagine_  why Christine Daaé was backstage in the opera house. And yet, there the girl stood, incongruous in her new finery, staring ahead and seeing nothing as she listened to the ballet girls rehearse down the hall.

The fact of Christine's being at the Opéra Populaire for anything other than a performance was noteworthy enough, but what truly struck Carlotta was the look on the silly child's face. Her expression, usually so incurably vapid, was filled with an intense desire, something close to passion. Once Carlotta had recovered from the shock of seeing anything noteworthy in Christine's eyes, an equally strong emotion surged within her own breast. Carlotta knew what that expression meant. She had felt it too many times herself to not recognize the burning  _need_  to be back up on that stage, an urge forceful enough to have spurred countless internecine rivalries and probably no shortage of ruined reputations or even fatalities.

It seemed that, despite Christine Daaé's ostensible withdrawal from the arts, Carlotta's reign was not as secure as she had hoped. As she watched the girl shake herself and make her way slowly back towards the stage door, Carlotta felt a dull realization sink within her. It seemed that the allure of the Vicomte de Chagny might not be enough to keep the little Swedish soubrette's artistic ambitions at bay, even if the girl herself was only beginning to realize that this was the case. And Carlotta knew that she would not rest easy until Christine had been removed altogether from Paris, or from the operatic scene, or both.

But how to break a well-trained dog of its only trick? Carlotta knew that Christine had had the same ambition drilled into her since childhood, raised to believe that her self-worth only came to true fruition when showered with the applause of an adoring audience. It would take something cataclysmic to break a lifelong habit of seeking that sort of reinforcement, something so destructive to Christine's emotions that she would never again desire to take to the stage. Surely such a crisis would be possible to manufacture? Surely Christine Daaé hated or feared  _something_  about the operatic world enough to want to leave it forever?

And when the obvious answer finally occurred to Carlotta, the beautiful irony of it all was not lost on her.

The truth was, the Phantom had already done most of the dirty work for her. Christine Daaé was clearly terrified of her murderous, obsessive erstwhile teacher, even as she continued to admire and yearn for him. It was a matter of manipulating what had been left when he disappeared, that was all.

The planning had been laughably easy. No one went into Christine's old dressing room anymore; even if Box Five had lost its haunted status for financial reasons, the dressing room's shattered mirror and the tunnel behind it remained unspeakably unnerving to virtually everyone in the opera house. When Carlotta finally worked up the nerve to peek inside after a dress rehearsal, she had spotted the monkey music box sitting on a side table; it was not the sort of thing that anyone would have given Christine Daaé, and a casual chat or two with the stagehands quickly revealed that Meg Giry had brought it up from the underbelly of the opera house, after the Phantom had disappeared and his subterranean lair had been discovered. Good. This could play to her advantage, in the future.

Next, there was the convenient fact that Count Christoph von Weber had decided to take her recommendation of sitting in Box Five for as long as he was in Paris. The managers were ecstatic to be able to charge a high fee for a box so near the stage; and the Count, having missed the melodrama of the previous season, did not regard the box with the superstitions that the rest of the Parisian élite held.

Even more conveniently, dear Fritz was still so proud of himself for having arranged an affair that both his former patron and his current co-star were so clearly enjoying.

"Will you sneak a message to him from me?" Carlotta asked Fritz at the end of the first intermission on the opening night of  _Rigoletto_.

"Why can't you sneak him a message yourself? Or just send one through one of the ushers?"

"How scandalous do you want us to be?" Carlotta laughed. "You're known to be his friend; you can just slip into his box and hand him a letter from me, and no one will think the worse of  _you_."

"When I'm supposed to be onstage?!"

"In this coming act, you only need to be onstage for the first half; after that, you have nothing to do until the top of Act Three," Carlotta pointed out.

"I might get mobbed by fans during intermission and miss my cue," Fritz winked.

"So you come back before the end of Act Two," Carlotta shrugged. "Oh, and here... wear this when you sneak into the box, maybe, so that no one recognizes you and tries to creep into the box after you."

Fritz raised an eyebrow as he took the mask from Carlotta, but he agreed to the plan with a mischievous grin. Carlotta had known that he would. Fritz was too much of a romantic to pass up ferrying love letters between parties; he was too much of a tenor to not revel in a ridiculous scheme that read like a scene from a comic opera; and he was far too pleased by how well Carlotta and the Count were getting on. Besides, like Christoph, he was one of the few people in the entire building who would not understand exactly why creeping about Box Five in a mask would incite such a strong reaction from one Christine Daaé.

"I was almost caught!" Fritz announced dramatically during the second intermission, when he appeared in her dressing room doorway. He tossed the mask back at Carlotta, who caught it.

"Oh?" she asked, wary but not too worried, given how gleeful Fritz looked about everything.

"There was this woman," he began, smoothing the cloak of his costume behind him and dropping onto the edge of Carlotta's chaise-longue. "I was trying to be as quiet as possible so that Christoph wouldn't have to take his eyes off of you; I thought I could maybe just slip your letter onto his knee and sneak out, without him even really noticing. But as soon as I got too close to the edge of the box, I heard a woman scream, and I ducked down behind the front of the box so that only Christoph could see me. I'm pretty sure she was pointing right at me, but of course everyone else was looking at her, and Christoph pretended nothing was wrong on his side of the theater, so no one paid us any mind. He was somewhat annoyed with me, actually," Fritz added, feigning offense. "But then I slipped him your letter and snuck back into the shadows and out of the box while everyone else was still paying attention to the woman across the way. I suspect he now sees how this was all in good fun. Although I do hope that the woman who got upset has calmed down by now; I'd feel terrible, otherwise."

"Well, I'm glad that you enjoyed this little adventure, and thank you," smiled Carlotta, giving Fritz a kiss on the cheek. "I'm sure the Count thanks you, as well — or, at least, I'll make sure by the end of tonight that he does."

So her little ploy had been executed just as perfectly as she had hoped. Carlotta had thought that that was all the excitement that she would have for the evening, until, returning to her dressing room for a quick costume change in Act Three, she spotted Christine Daaé wandering through the halls, seemingly lost in her own world. Impulsively, and not quite knowing herself why she did it, Carlotta slipped into Christine's old dressing room, wound up the little monkey music box, and put it carefully in the entrance to the tunnel down to the Phantom's lair. More than likely, she knew, Christine would wander straight past the room and remain ignorant of the music box inside of it, of the trap that was set and waited for its prey.

So, when Carlotta exited the stage from the final curtain call, beaming with pride and coursing with adrenaline, her heart practically leapt out of her chest when she saw that the door to the abandoned dressing room was wide open.

"Never seen that room open before," Fritz remarked as Carlotta rushed forward.

"Fritz? I need your help," Carlotta called, turning back towards him. Blood pounded in her ears; it seemed impossible that, for the second time this evening, a somewhat spontaneous plan could have worked out so seamlessly.

Fritz joined her in the doorway of the dressing room and stared.

"Is that Christine Daaé?" he asked.

"Help me get her to my dressing room," Carlotta ordered. She picked the now-silent music box off of Christine's lap, and Fritz easily lifted the tiny girl's prone frame from the chair in which she had collapsed. Together, they carried Christine down the hallway to Carlotta's dressing room, where Fritz laid her carefully on the chaise-longue.

"We should call for help," he said, clearly flustered.

"First, have an usher send word to the Vicomte de Chagny that Christine Daaé is in my dressing room," Carlotta told him. "Box Six. I'll stay here with her, in case she wakes."

Fritz nodded, then rushed out the door. Carlotta placed the music box under a chair and tossed her costume skirt over it as she undressed. When she had donned her own clothes, she stood and contemplated Christine for a long moment, admiring and loathing how angelic she looked even unconscious, with her delicate features and her pale face. Then she pulled a letter from the drawer of her vanity, and a red rose from a bouquet that someone had handed her just before she exited the stage, and slipped out of the door of her dressing room.

Carlotta had just left the two new offerings in the shattered frame of the mirror and partially closed the door of Christine's old dressing room behind her, when the managers appeared out of nowhere and accosted her with flattery and chocolates and flutes of champagne. She accepted all three, and made her way back to her dressing room just in time to see Christine Daaé awake and rush unsteadily out the door. When Carlotta saw the Vicomte escorting Christine from the theater, and the girl gave Carlotta a tense little nod of acknowledgement, the older soprano worried for a moment that her second set of offerings had not been retrieved. But as Christine's figure grew farther and farther away down the hall, Carlotta noticed the red rose clutched in one hand, and the letter crumpled beneath it.

Now it was just a matter of waiting to see whether the silly girl would have the nerve to obey her master.


	4. Not To Be Lost That Day

_Recordare, Jesu pie,_  
_Quod sum causa tuæ viæ:_  
_Ne me perdas illa die._

* * *

 _Fondest greetings, dear Christine!_  
_Have you forgotten all the honors I am due?_  
_To observe my fallen state, would it not be fit to sing a requiem?_  
_Or have you flown so high of late, that my memory is one that you condemn?_  
_And who now will mourn my fate, if my passing is unsung by even you?_  
_The role of an Angel is to announce what's decreed;_  
_The role of a songbird to sing, 'til her master has deemed that she should be freed..._

"Well?" Christine demanded tearfully as Carlotta lowered the letter.

"Why don't you take a seat, my dear?" murmured Carlotta, gesturing to a chair in her drawing room. Weak sunlight from the cloudy day outside filtered through the tall windows of Carlotta's apartment, and the shadows that pooled beneath her couches and tables and upholstered chaises and piano appeared softer than usual. Christine dabbed at her eyes with a lace-trimmed handkerchief and dropped gracefully onto the edge of the chair, on which she perched like a distressed little songbird, indeed.

"You said this was delivered to you?" Carlotta asked.

Christine shook her head.

"It was in my dressing room, that night you found me after the opera. Almost... almost as if he had  _known_  what I would do, that I would go looking for him." Christine shuddered. "You really didn't seen anything to indicate that he's still there, Signora? The night that you found me, or any other time?"

Carlotta chose to maintain a cryptic silence, upon which she was sure that Christine would impose whatever interpretation the girl most desired.

It was all she could do to maintain her glee, really. She had worked so hard to make that letter look like it had come from the Phantom; spent a good hour learning to mimic his spindly handwriting, using the threatening missive that he had once left her; kept her imitation hidden in the back of her vanity with the intention of sending it Christine, once the girl had been convinced that her Angel might not have disappeared completely. Apparently, her efforts had paid off.

Christine shut her eyes and seemed to be holding her breath. Her handkerchief, embroidered with her initials in one corner, trembled in her hands.

"Would you really want him to have returned?" Carlotta asked, trying to sound more curious than disdainful. "After everything he did?"

"Yes," Christine said with a harsh sob. Then her enormous eyes sprang back open, and she clapped her hand to her mouth, suppressing her deepest emotions until she could answer reasonably. "I mean, no, of course not. Not after all the people he killed, not after the awful way that he treated  _you_ , Signora..."

Christine paused.

"And yet?" Carlotta prompted.

Christine blinked at her.

"And yet I haven't felt truly alive since he disappeared," she said simply. A moment later, another shudder rattled her dainty frame, and she shut her eyes tight once again. "I'm sorry, I don't mean that. Of course I don't mean that."

"It makes perfect sense to me." Christine's eyes opened once more, and she stared hard at Carlotta, who shrugged. "Well, he was your teacher, was he not, for your entire singing career? Small wonder you associate him with being on the stage. You miss it, more than you've missed anything in your life, and so you miss him."

Christine gaped at Carlotta. Her handkerchief dropped from her hand and fluttered to the floor.

"No, I..." the poor girl stammered. "I don't miss it."

"Don't miss it? Or  _can't_  miss it?"

Carlotta smiled benevolently at Christine as the young woman tugged nervously at the fingertips of her gloves.

"You can tell?" she whispered finally.

"My dear," Carlotta replied, "it is the purview of an artist to intuit the thoughts and emotions of others. Besides, who among us has not faced her doubts, her demons, her setbacks, her necessary temporary retreats from the glow of those twinkling lights of the stage? In such moments, I too have longed for things to be set right by a mentor — an angel, if you will."

Christine nodded, her eyes not meeting Carlotta's.

"It's all I've ever known," she said softly, almost as if caught in a dream. "I love Raoul, I really do, but — but I don't know what it  _means_  to be a vicomtesse. I don't even really know what it means to be someone's wife."

"Well, I'm afraid that I can't help you on either count," shrugged Carlotta. "In spite of the many roles that I have played, in reality, I know one life only, Miss Daaé, and it is that of a singer. Unless you need help with anything related to music, I'm afraid I can offer you no useful advice."

But Christine's eyes had grown wide at this insincere apology, and she suddenly seized Carlotta's hand.

"The Mozart Requiem," she asked Carlotta urgently. "Do you know it?"

"Of course. Why?"

"Mozart was a god to him. That was what he told me. That was why he chose Don Juan for the subject of his opera, to pay homage to what his idol had created a century before. He once said that if Mozart had lived twice as long as he did, then all of the beautiful music that could possibly be written would be down on paper already, and he wouldn't have any reason to compose at all. And he never wrote a requiem of his own. So it has to be Mozart, don't you see?"

"See what?" Carlotta asked, although of course she already knew.

Christine did not answer immediately, only lifted the letter again and gazed at it, as if in a trance.

" _'To sing, 'til her master has deemed that she should be freed'_... He wants me to sing once again for him, Signora. Then he'll let me go. One final mass for the dead, and then it will all be over."

She turned her enormous eyes towards Carlotta.

"Signora, it has been months since I have sung, and I need to be sure that I can perform the part flawlessly. I must honor him as he would demand to be honored, and that means that I cannot make any mistakes that he might interpret as disrespect. You've seen first-hand what happens when he is angry. It must be perfect so that he will be satisfied, and no one else will be hurt by his fury. Signora, I need someone to teach me all of the things that I did not have time to learn under his tutelage. And I need someone who understands the consequences of what will happen if I do not perform to his standards. Will you help me?"

Carlotta bowed her head magnanimously.

"It would be my pleasure, Miss Daaé," she purred.

They began that day. First, a half-hour of vocalises, to reacquaint Christine with technique that had gone stale in the absence of her former teacher; within minutes, the Swedish soubrette had regained the crystalline purity of her tone at its finest, and Carlotta had to keep herself from scowling with jealousy at how beautifully clear and distinct the girl's voice managed to make every note of even the fastest scale. And, as Christine worked her way back into her best singing voice, Carlotta noticed how the girl's spine seemed to straighten a little, how she immediately snapped into the single-minded focus of a performer; with each repetition of each vocalise, the color returned slightly to her cheeks, the glimmer to her eyes. By the time Christine Daaé was adequately warmed up, she had lost the deflated look of an uncertain newcomer to the scene of the Parisian aristocracy, and she carried herself with the poise and confidence of a true prima donna.

Carlotta couldn't decide if the balance of her emotions tipped more towards impressed respect or embittered fury. This was  _not_  going how she had planned.

Nevertheless, the pretense could not be cut short without Christine suspecting anything, so Carlotta dutifully tugged her vocal score of the requiem in question off of a shelf crammed with sheet music, a few loose sheafs of paper fluttering to her parlour floor as she did so. And, seated behind the piano, plunking out the chords of the Introitus with her adequate keyboard skills, she was relieved to hear Christine falter a little on the soaring soprano lines, as if by staring the requiem in the face, the girl was suddenly confronted with the absurdly high standard to which she was holding herself. Christine sang the opening minor third, her voice stuttering a bit; then she sang the line again; then again, her voice hiccuping just a touch on the higher note every repetition.

"It's not even that high!" she finally burst out, her voice tense with suppressed tears.

Carlotta responded by closing the keyboard and rising to her feet, trying to hide her smugness over how distraught the girl was.

"Let's stop for today," she told Christine. "You don't even know the music yet; take my score home and learn the notes properly, and then we'll work on how your voice can best maneuver its way around your passaggio for interval leaps like that."

Christine nodded tearfully as she took the heavy score from her new teacher.

"Thank you, Signora," she whispered, and, bobbing awkwardly into a curtsey, she turned and practically fled Carlotta's parlour.

The older soprano remained at her piano, absent-mindedly plunking out bits and pieces of Mozart from memory, her thoughts filled with the memory of that soaring, bell-like voice, and a curious sensation that fell between the passions of hatred and desire fluttering in her stomach. The younger dashed home with the score of Mozart's final masterpiece clutched in her arms, as if its preservation alone could deliver the world from disaster — and when she entered the Palais de Chagny, flushed and gasping for breath and clutching a bound volume in her arms, the servants noted in their quiet fashion that the future Vicomtesse sported a genuine, unconscious smile for the first time that any of them could recall.

Christine arrived at Carlotta's apartment at precisely three o'clock every Tuesday thereafter. Her understanding and mastery of the music blossomed, and her voice gained in brilliance and strength as her confidence grew day by day. Once or twice, when Christine had finally worked out the vocal maneuvering necessary to tackle a phrase that had been giving her trouble, or managed to control her breath such that she could sing even a long sustained line through to the end with power, Carlotta caught herself registering genuine pride in her pupil's achievements. Was this how the Phantom had felt, she wondered, when he heard Christine sing? Did he, too, delight in the knowledge that he had helped to shape the creation of such an otherworldly sound?

She spoke to M. Lefèvre about the preparation of the opera's orchestra, to the managers about the use of the opera house. All three men were more than a little surprised to hear that Carlotta was helping to organize an opportunity for Christine to sing in public, but they all agreed without hesitation. M. Lefèvre, who had known Carlotta the longest, even patted her on the arm in an avuncular fashion and said, "I'm very proud of you, my dear, for putting old grudges behind you and doing such a kind thing for the child." Carlotta had smiled sweetly back, and was perplexed to discover that the gesture was almost borne of actual agreement.

For her intentions had not changed. She still wanted nothing more than for the silly little soubrette to suffer some sort of attack of nerves over the pressures being placed upon her, and for the strain to convince her to stay away from the opera forever. She still spent entire evenings in a state of torment over the beauty of Christine Daaé's voice and person, and the fact that such attributes would never be hers. But, at the same time, being Christine's teacher gave her a degree of agency and ownership over the girl's music; she was now an active participant in the production of that ethereal voice, the candle that shed enough light for the machinery to be correctly operated. It gave Carlotta a sense of fulfillment that she never would have expected to be possible, especially when derived from such close proximity to her detested rival.

Sometimes, when Carlotta reflected on the fact that this whole exercise was designed to drive Christine to the brink of madness, she wondered if the entire operation had not backfired and imposed the desired effect upon herself.

But no, she still could focus, when she reminded herself to do so. After two months of training, Carlotta finally remembered to begin applying some subtle pressures on Christine, small reminders of the burden before her.

"Do not hammer that second note, Miss Daaé. You are promising the Lord hymns and vows in the Holy Land; you are not demanding anything, you are  _pleading_  for eternal rest to be granted to the dead."

"More legato, Miss Daaé — would a truly great maestro have appreciated the choppiness of that line?"

"Let's try that phrase again, Miss Daaé. You'll want to make it as perfect as possible for the event in question. You cannot afford to fail, for all of our sake."

The reminders had their effect. Christine sang more and more beautifully, but she became more and more distraught over the slightest mistake. Hitting a note slightly off-pitch began to send her into fits of panic that required her to take a few minutes to recompose herself; a nervous tic developed just under her left eye that made itself evident whenever she approached a spot in the music that tended to give her trouble. Perhaps it was Carlotta's imagination, but although Christine the singer grew more beautiful and confident by the week when in her element, Christine the woman grew thinner and more drawn with each passing lesson.

One day, Carlotta stopped Christine in the middle of the Recordare and, with a sigh, leaned her chin on an arm propped against the edge of her keyboard.

"What does all of this mean to you?" she asked her pupil, waving a hand expressively in Christine's direction.

Christine blinked.

"It's a prayer to Christ to stay with the speaker on the Day of Judgment, and to absolve him," she recited.

"Because?" Carlotta prompted.

"Because... Christ has already suffered on the cross for our sins?"

"And his sacrifice for our salvation should not be in vain." Carlotta pursed her lips. "This is an enormous plea that you are making, Miss Daaé. You are asking someone who has suffered and died for your sake to return, and to guide and guard you on your path to eternal peace. Do you understand what this means?"

"Yes," breathed Christine, her face growing pale.

"Well, let it come across in your singing, then."

"I don't know how—"

"You used to sing with much more passion than you do now," Carlotta informed her curtly. "Try to regain some of it, please."

Christine's pale cheeks flushed and she bowed her head.

"I don't know if I can," she muttered, staring at the ground in embarrassment.

Carlotta arched an eyebrow.

"You see," Christine explained in a small voice, "ever since... ever since  _he_  left, I just haven't felt things as strongly as I once did. Everything has seemed muted, you see?"

"Oh?"

"Sounds are murkier," Christine said with a small sigh, "colors duller, touch deadened. In fact, these past few weeks working on the Requiem with you have been the most vivid that I can recall for months, and if even that isn't enough to bring back what I once had when I sang for him..."

Christine's voice broke. Carlotta stared.

"You truly did love him, then."

"I don't know," Christine sobbed hysterically. "I don't know what I thought. I only know that, when he spoke to me, it was like the stars themselves were singing; and the roses that he left me glowed bright red, petal after unfurling blazing petal. And when he touched me..."

A shudder ran through her dainty frame. Carlotta rose from the bench of her piano and walked slowly towards her pupil. She placed a hand under Christine's tear-streaked, trembling chin and lifted it so that it was level. The young soprano's enormous dark eyes were glossy with anguish, and they implored Carlotta for aid, implored even though the girl did not know what she wanted or needed.

Slowly, as though she knew that moving too fast would frighten away her prey, Carlotta snaked an arm around Christine's waist and pulled the girl towards her.

"Fire," she whispered. "That is what his touch was, wasn't it? And that is what your singing has lost, Miss Daaé. That is what what you must try to find once again."

And then she pressed her mouth to Christine Daaé's and kissed her, slow and deep, as if she could suck the voice straight from the girl's delicate throat if she tried hard enough, her arms all the while tightening greedily about Christine's waist, like a python slowly crushing the life out of its victim.

Later that afternoon, Christine stumbled home to the Palais de Chagny in a daze punctuated with moments of absolute clarity. Sounds blared loudly once more as carriages and pedestrians jostled for space on the busy streets; the sky and the Seine both had flared to life in their own respective shades of intense blue; the smells of bouquets and cooking meat and even dust once more dazzled her senses. Christine Daaé felt more alive than she had in months, and she knew that that afternoon, she had truly  _sung_  as she had once been able to sing — sung with a degree of raw emotion that might have made her Angel weep.

 _But at what cost_ , Christine wondered numbly. She stopped on the Pont Neuf and stared out over the lapping waves on the surface of the Seine beneath. That price was where the daze began, where her newly found engagement with the world around her receded into churning, overwhelming confusion and guilt. Yes, she had sung once again, but when she recalled what she had let La Carlotta  _do_  to her — when she trembled at the thought of what had happened, and recognized that her trembling was not entirely due to disgust and shame — it all barely seemed worth the sacrifice. Was she fated to succumb to temptation, to put her own immortal soul at risk with immoral acts, in exchange for a performance befitting her late teacher?

Christine considered the sensation of Carlotta's hands against her back, the pressure of her mouth and tongue. It was nothing at all like the perfunctory kisses that they had once traded as part of the staging of  _Il Muto._ It was nothing even like the gallant politeness with which Raoul conducted his courtship. Carlotta was as insistent and forceful and  _hungry_  as the Phantom had been, and, like the Phantom, she too had extracted from Christine a true and entirely forbidden passion.

The blue of the sky throbbed, crushingly intense. Christine shut her eyes for a moment, overwhelmed, torn between the pulsing vibrancy that had refilled her world, and the safe numbness in which she had enveloped herself for so long.

 _I'll do it for him_ , she told herself stubbornly.  _I'll sing the way that he would have wanted me to, no matter what I have to do. I'll sing the way that I was born to sing, for him, and for myself. And then I will leave the stage forever, and I will never have to see that evil woman again, and Raoul will keep me safe from harm for the rest of our lives._

So decided, she opened her eyes and continued slowly on her way back to her gilded cage, alone and uncertain.

From her window above the streets of Paris, Carlotta challenged the sky with a smug sneer, secure in the knowledge that Christine would return, in spite of what had transpired between them. Perhaps the girl loathed and feared Carlotta, but the older soprano had seen the look of desperate need in her pupil's eyes, and she knew that Christine's fear of failure and reliance on her teaching would force her to return in a week's time, right on schedule.  _Poor fool_ , Carlotta smirked to herself,  _poor fool for trusting me to guide her to salvation._  The human soul, she knew by now, was a twisted labyrinth of hopes and yearnings and doubts and terrors — and how deliciously easy it would be to lead the young and naïve Christine Daaé straight to the center of that labyrinth, and then quietly retreat, rewinding the string that could have led her back out to safety, leaving the girl abandoned and utterly lost.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, I realized that this is all TOTALLY messed up. My basic assumption is that, by this point, Christine is suffering from horrible, horrible PTSD over everything involving the Phantom. At the same time, she has never had a normal experience with a voice teacher, and so assumes that emotional/sexual abuse is part of the whole deal of becoming a better singer, because the Phantom was an excellent teacher and also an altogether awful and abusive human being. And Carlotta recognizes and exploits all of this, because she is a terrible person.


	5. When The Cursed Are Silent

_Confutatis maledictis,_  
_Flammis acribus addictis,_  
_Voca me cum benedictis._

 _Oro supplex et acclinis,_  
_Cor contritum quasi cinis,_  
_Gere curam mei finis._

* * *

Christine watched dawn break on the day of the performance. The streets of Paris outside her window shuddered from their monochrome stillness, and stirred with the whir of birds' wings and the quiet scuffling of street vendors urging their laden beasts of burden to market. The light of the sun filtered over the horizon, fragile but determined, until finally the sky shone silvery-gold and threw the skyline of the newly remade city into dreamy relief.

The young soprano's face was drawn with exhaustion. Her bare arms shook when touched by the chilled morning air, and she leaned her head against the frame of her window with a heavy sigh.

"Sing once again for him," she murmured to herself, "and then you can sleep undisturbed, Christine. Then you can finally rest in peace."

Voices echoed faintly from the streets below: untroubled citizens of Paris exchanging pleasantries, gossiping about the latest in the feuilletons, laughing and smoking and whistling. Perhaps it was simply her fatigue, but Christine could have sworn that a ghostly sigh floated above them all, borne on the wind along with the half-remembered aroma of rose petals.  _Christine, Christine..._

The girl in question nearly leapt through her window with a terrified yelp when she felt someone touch her shoulder.

"Christine!" And all of a sudden, as though she had been hovering outside herself and had just fallen sharply back into her body, she was tethered once more to solid reality. "My dear, are you all right?"

She knew so well by now the gentle weight of her fiancé's hands on her shoulders, and the way he often smelled just ever so slightly of the horses that he so loved to ride. She knew the deep timbre of his voice, knew the way the corners of his eyes crinkled in delight whenever he saw her.

"Oh, Raoul," she sighed, leaning back against him as his arms closed in protectively around her.

"You look exhausted," he chided her gently. "You can't expect to perform well, if you don't get any rest, you know."

Christine nodded wearily. Raoul kissed her on the top of her head, then released her and sat down on the window ledge opposite her.

"You would tell me if something was bothering you, wouldn't you?" he asked anxiously. "Only you haven't seemed yourself lately."

"Just nerves, I suppose," Christine answered with a twitchy smile.

"Hmm. Well, it's true that you haven't been onstage in some time. Although I have no doubt whatsoever that you'll find your footing with no trouble at all. You know, I think it's wonderful that you're giving yourself a proper send-off from the stage. It'll give everyone a chance to say farewell and sing your praises for an evening, in a way that they really weren't able before. Just remember that it's supposed to be a happy event, and don't put too much pressure on yourself, hmm?"

When Christine continued to look crumpled and withdrawn, he leaned forward and kissed her chastely on the mouth. Christine leaned her head against his shoulder and let him hold her, one of his hands stroking her hair.  _To hold me and to hide_   _me_ , isn't that all she had asked of him, once upon a time? What silly promises they had made to each other, in the folly of their optimistic youth.

"Whatever the matter is, whether or not you want to talk about it, I'm here," Raoul murmured. "Remember that, won't you?"

Christine nodded into Raoul's shoulder, secure and warm and utterly miserable. How could she possibly explain to him that singing was the only thing that was keeping her alive at this moment, and that at the same time, it had become a burden too great to bear, one that was slowly crushing her, turning the one act that brought her life true meaning into a blur of hatred and fear?

"You are too good to me," she told him.

"Nothing in this world could be too good for you, my angel," Raoul replied. When Christine began to cry quietly, he simply held her, never questioning and never guessing that she was crying because of him — because she loved him so, and yet he would never be enough.

* * *

The dress rehearsal the day before had gone, by even M. Lefèvre's exacting standards, very well. The opera chorus, freed of the obligations of having to move and phonate simultaneously, had seemingly funneled its dramatic sensibilities entirely into the music. The orchestra had been brought up onto the stage, for once, and was reveling in its moment in the spotlight. Everyone was excited to engage with the deceptive complexity of a Mozart piece that relied not on spectacle, but on precision — to be stepping away from the scope and density of grand opera for a few brief afternoons.

And everyone, whether welcoming or not, was excited to see Christine Daaé again.

Meg Giry, of course, practically flung herself at her friend. The managers seemed somewhat apprehensive about the possibility that a masked menace might come swooping out of nowhere at Christine's return, but they greeted her graciously and with all of the subservience due to the fiancée of one of their major sponsors. Even Fritz approached Christine, after the rehearsal had wrapped up and she was quietly gathering her things, to kiss her hand gallantly and compliment her performance.

"She's certainly not you," he told Carlotta in the wings afterwards, "but my god, what a celestial sound!"

Carlotta had spent most of the rehearsal backstage, moodily listening to things going exactly as she had hoped they would. She rarely was struck by stage fright at this point in her career, and yet the infinite number of directions the next twenty-four hours could take haunted her the entire rehearsal. She prowled back and forth in the wings, restless, viciously counting the number of times that Christine hit a note slightly off, wishing that this whole business were already over.

Before she left the opera house, Christine sought Carlotta out.

"How did it sound?" Christine asked apprehensively.

"Good," replied Carlotta neutrally. Which was the truth; Christine had sounded as heavenly as could be expected of any mortal.

"But?"

Christine bit her lower lip, waiting for the criticism to fall. She had become so frail and thin since she began working on the Requiem, and her already-enormous eyes were ringed with dark circles that spoke of many sleepless nights. The addition of this small motion made her seem all the more like the frightened, self-critical child that she was. For a fleeting moment, Carlotta felt a spasm of guilt that she was feeding Christine's obsession as she was, preying on the insecurities of such a fragile soul. It was almost enough to make her tell Christine to stop being so hard on herself, to accept that no performance was flawless and that perfection was an impossible standard.

"You still are not singing the Benedictus right," she told Christine instead. "Less pressure on the held and tied notes. Right now, you are crushing them with your insistence that they bend to your will. Stop trying to control them; let them fly free. You understand what that means?"

Christine's jaw clenched in disappointment, but she said nothing. Carlotta reached a hand out and cupped it forcefully under Christine's chin, stepping closer so that she and Christine were almost nose to nose. For a long moment, they stared at each other, the tension thick between them. Then Christine nodded, and Carlotta let her fingers trace the smoothness of the girl's cheek as she stepped away.

"Good. I trust you will do it correctly tomorrow, when you know that you must."

Christine, unable to withstand the pressure, burst into tears and fled.

Carlotta, too, was unable to sleep the night before the concert, and so she made her way back to the opera house early the next morning. Stagehands were still setting up chairs and music stands on the stage, and sweeping the carpets in the aisles. Carlotta aimlessly meandered the wings, trying to distract herself. When she passed by Christine's former dressing room, however, she noticed that the door was ajar and a flickering candle lit within. Quietly, Carlotta pushed the door open.

Christine sat on the ground before the shattered mirror, tears quietly coursing down her face.

"The first time I ever heard the Mozart Requiem, my father was playing concertmaster," she said without looking at Carlotta. "I wasn't excited about going to the performance, you know; I was still at an age where I didn't think music was interesting unless there were characters moving across the stage. But he told me that, even if I didn't understand what the piece meant when I heard it the first time, I would understand it one day."

Christine smiled grimly.

"And then they played it at my father's funeral. It was a very small affair; the only reason the concert happened at all was because my father's friends were all musicians, and they knew how much he had loved the piece, and it was their way of grieving together. I was still too young to understand it. I don't think that I paid much attention to the music at all, I was so distraught over having lost him. If I thought about the requiem at all, it wasn't for the sake of the music itself, but because of what it meant to my father. My father, who loved music more than anything in this world, except perhaps me."

"He would have been very proud of you," Carlotta said.

"Would he?" Christine finally looked up at Carlotta. "I ask myself this all the time, Signora. If he were here, if he could see me, would he be proud of me? Here I am, about to leave behind the only thing he ever wanted me to do, out of — I don't know what, fear, guilt?"

"Love?" Carlotta asked sardonically.

A hollow laugh escaped from Christine's throat.

"The point is that I can't stay here, and be the person he always wanted me to be. Two men are dead because of me. Maybe more. And I didn't ask for it, I didn't ask for any of it, I only wanted to sing..."

Christine dissolved into tears. Carlotta stepped forward and laid her hand on the girl's shoulder.

"You know, the requiem isn't entirely Mozart's?" Carlotta said conversationally. "He died before it was finished. The last notes that he wrote were those heartbreaking first eight bars of the Lacrimosa; the rest of the mass was finished by one of his students. You see what I mean?"

"What do you mean, Signora?" asked Christine in a small voice.

"What I mean is that something does not have to be completed to still be considered a masterpiece. A requiem, a love affair, a career — what matters is the quality of what was, not its duration. You understand?"

Christine sniffled slightly and nodded.

"You possess one of the great voices of our age, Christine Daaé," murmured Carlotta into the girl's ear. "Even if you stop now, it will resonate for generations to come. You have done all that you needed to do to be the soprano that you were born to be. I assure you, he would have been very proud."

Carlotta had been sweetly sliding a knife of resentful flattery between Christine's ribs as she spoke; now, as she took her hand from Christine's shoulder and swept towards the door of the dressing room, she suddenly twisted it.

"Just be sure that you sing your best today, so that you are forever remembered for being as great as you have been, and not for any events incidental to your career."

And Christine was left all alone once more with her flickering candle, contemplating the crushing weight of her legacy. Before her, the dark mouth of the shattered mirror yawned in a silent scream.

* * *

Two hours later, the backstage of the opera house was a flurry of voices and tuning instruments and footsteps and laughter and bodies pressed closely together as people edged their way through tight spaces. Sheets of music slid from folders; tardy chorus members sauntered in through the side doors; scales (both played and sung) ricocheted off the walls.

Carlotta had just finished testing all of the ropes of the backdrops, seeing which one could most discreetly be unwound and dropped loudly to the floor in the event of Christine Daaé singing too well, when she practically walked straight into the girl herself.

"There you are," she scolded the young soprano, seizing her arm and steering her back towards the dressing room that had been assigned Christine for this event. "Why are you not yet dressed? The concert begins in only ten minutes, after all. Have you warmed yourself up...?"

She stopped when she saw the fresh red rose that Christine was twirling between her fingers.

"Where did you get that?" Carlotta demanded in a strangled voice.

Christine's expression was dazed.

"He's here," she replied breathlessly.

"He can't be," Carlotta replied automatically.

"It was in my dressing room," Christine continued in a hushed voice. "I walked through the broken frame of the mirror, and only a few paces inside, there it was. I know he left it there for me to find, Signora."

"That's impossible," Carlotta choked.

"He's left me roses there before," Christine insisted, her voice rising in defensive agitation. "And the letter that I showed you."

"But—" Carlotta caught herself a second before she gave herself away. "Yes. Yes, I suppose he has."

Christine turned a solemn gaze to the rose that she cradled in both hands.

"Well, I suppose this is it," she said quietly. "Either he'll be pleased, and all will be well; or he won't be."

"What then will you do?" Carlotta whispered.

"Whatever I must." Christine looked back up at Carlotta. "But whatever happens, Signora, I cannot thank you enough for having prepared me. You have given far more than I ever could have asked of you — made me aware of my failings, and done everything imaginable to help me correct them as best as I could. Any error that I make today is my own. And to think that I once disliked you, when you have been so good to me! Please, forgive me, for all of the wrongs that I have done you and so many others."

Carlotta nodded. Christine's mouth quirked into a smile, and then a shudder ran through her entire body.

"Miss Daaé, are you sure you are fit to sing?" Carlotta asked, although she knew that Christine would sing — knew that Christine  _had_  to sing, and the question was now only how quickly she would succumb to nerves.

"One way or another, I will be," replied Christine. "After my swan song is complete and the rest disappears into silence. Don't be afraid for my sake, Signora. When your life has been cursed for as long as mine has, facing the horror and ending it however it must end can only bring relief."

 _But what will become of the rest of us?_  Carlotta asked herself fearfully as Christine began to wander towards her dressing room, the rose still trembling in her fingers.

"Christine!" Carlotta called after her.

The young woman paused, and turned back towards her teacher.

"Sing well," said Carlotta after a long moment. "We all are depending on you."

Christine bowed her head once in acknowledgement, then continued on her way.

 _Damn it_ , thought Carlotta as she swept through the backstage and emerged through a doorway into a corridor that would take her to the audience. Emerging into the theater, she glanced up at the chandelier suspended above the assembled crowd of Parisians, who were milling about their seats and boxes to exchange small talk and compliment each other's finery. If Christine was right — if the Phantom truly had returned — and if catastrophe struck, how many more would die? How much blood would end up on Carlotta's hands?

The notion of Christine Daaé choking on her nerves mid-concert suddenly seemed less like sweet retribution, and more like holding a lit match to a tinderbox.

But there was nothing now that Carlotta could do, nothing except take her seat in Box Five and pray that no disaster beyond her imagination would occur.

The orchestra was onstage by now, and the chorus was almost done filing onto the stage. Carlotta watched as the instrumentalists tuned, then as M. Lefèvre led the soloists out onto the stage. Christine's expression still was disoriented, and Fritz was gallantly keeping her moving in the right direction with a gentle hand resting beneath her elbow. Thankfully, the girl had changed into the correct dress, but as the soloists took their seats in front of the orchestra, Carlotta noticed that Christine still clutched the rose that she had found in one hand.

The chandelier flickered. Christine's gaze snapped upwards, her eyes wide and anxious. Carlotta wondered why no one else seemed to have noticed.

M. Lefèvre raised his arms, and all breath in the opera house suddenly was suspended, anticipating the first downbeat. When it fell — earthy and ponderous in the lower strings — Carlotta felt a shudder run through her own body. It wasn't solely because of her heightened nerves, of her sudden terror that her own jealousy would destroy even more lives. The start of this particular requiem had always ignited within her the same gut-wrenching recognition of her own mortality. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.

The woodwinds began to layer themselves into the relentless framework set out by the strings, ebbing and flowing, until suddenly the entire string section erupted into an outburst of anguish. Then the voices entered part by part, insistent and foreboding, rising and falling and twisting around and through each other in a churning expression of grief, until they finally united in a fanfare of faint optimism. Christine stood as the orchestra again quietly inserted itself into the conversation. The rose in her hand still trembled, but her face was resolute as she took a deep breath and began to sing.

 _Te decet hymnus, Deus, in Sion  
_ _Et tibi reddetur votum in Jerusalem..._

The young soprano nearly collapsed back into her chair as the orchestra and chorus stridently expanded upon her promise. She looked exhausted by the effort of having sung just those two brief lines, but her pure voice had soared out clear and confident and utterly perfect, and a shimmer of excitement had rustled silently through the audience in its wake. No need for the Phantom to have any complaints with regards to the performance that his beloved was putting on, so far. She had been well-trained, indeed.

Carlotta brushed a hand across her cheek and was startled to find that it was wet with tears.

She sat perfectly poised through the next two movements, as still and as tightly wound as Christine Daaé sat down on the stage below. The girl was still trembling slightly, but her eyes shone with a grim determination. When she stood, her eyes met Carlotta's. The older soprano merely gave her pupil an unsmiling nod, torn between her desire to see Christine fail dramatically, her terror that any such failure would incite immediate violent, and her longing to hear the girl sing such exquisite music as perfectly as possible.

 _Quid sum miser tunc dicturus?_  
_Quem patronum rogaturus,_  
_Cum vix iustus sit securus?_

If Christine's performance in the first movement had contained a trance-like quality, she now poured elegant emotion into every appoggiatura that she sang. Carlotta gripped the edge of her box as she absorbed each graceful note.  _What then will one as miserable as I say? What lord shall I beg, when even the just are unsure?_  Was this ecstasy? Had she ever been as entirely engrossed in the creation of music as she was in this moment? Would she ever put such high stakes and derive such intense pleasure from her own singing? Or had Christine Daaé — by her own estimation cursed — consigned Carlotta to a delirious Hell from which she would never be able to escape, even long after Christine had ceased to sing?

Her nerves had only just recovered when the Recordare began. Christine sang with brilliant delicacy, but the lines were drawn out, and the movement was long. Halfway through, Christine — whose support had been shallow with nerves the entire concert — chose not to breathe in the middle of a line, and realized it a second before she nervously grasped for a high note that came out sharp in timbre and flat in pitch. Her face immediately flushed, and as she attempted to rally herself for the rest of the movement, she glanced once more in Carlotta's direction. Carlotta's lips were tight, her face mask-like, waiting as she was for the blow to fall, and at the same time savagely rejoicing over the fact that Christine Daaé had proven herself just as human and fallible as the rest of them. Christine, seeking reassurance in her moment of panic and finding none, turned away, betrayed. She managed to pull herself together by the end of the piece, but a flutter of suppressed tears tinged the core of every note, and when the movement was over, she crumpled into her chair, the rose falling listlessly from her hand.

The irony was that the audience would not remember a few minutes of singing that was merely adequate by comparison. Christine had already enchanted them, had already won their affection and approval. The vast majority were not trained musicians and would never catch a failure of technique, let alone recall it after the fact; and those who were musicians had experienced their own moments of subpar performance and were sympathetic. Either way, a momentary setback did not alter anyone's overall impression of Christine Daaé and her glorious, angelic voice. But Christine Daaé was singing for a very specific audience, one that she believed deserved and would accept nothing short of objective perfection. By that unrealistic measure, she had failed unforgivably.

Carlotta stared down at the frail little figure huddled miserably in her chair. Behind her, the chorus thundered a vision of eternal flame, punctuated with quiet supplications for mercy. Christine's face was turned downwards, as she attempted to collect herself before she next needed to sing. Finally, as the Confutatis quietly concluded, she looked up. The orchestra paused, then played a quiet seventh chord as it anticipated the start of the Lacrimosa.

In the pause that followed, the chandelier flickered again.

The violins and violas softly began exchanging lilting expressions of sorrow as Christine's gaze focused upwards on something that Carlotta could not see. The girl reached down slowly and picked the fallen rose from where she had dropped it, her eyes never leaving whatever had attracted her attention. As the chorus mournfully added their voices to the orchestra, Christine slowly rose from her chair, even though she was not called to sing until the next movement. Her expression — pale and wide-eyed and expectant — balanced rapture with terror. She took a hesitant step forward, then another, as the chorus gradually crescendoed into a full-throated expression of despair. Her mouth opened, as if she were about to sing, but instead, she gasped almost inaudibly, and crumpled to the floor as the chorus reached the climax of its line and subsided back into hushed agony.

If M. Lefèvre even heard the audience's horrified reaction, he ignored it. The music continued (despite the distraction of virtually all of the musicians except the conductor himself) as Fritz dashed forward and lifted Christine's prone form in his arms. He was carrying her offstage as Carlotta rushed from Box Five. She raced down the corridors and stairwells of the opera house that she knew so well, and emerged backstage just in time to hear the movement end and a clearly panicked Firmin announce from the stage that the performance would resume after a short break. Standing just off stage left, a flurry of movement caught her eye in the opposite wing, and she watched as Meg Giry dashed towards her mother, and, after a brief exchange, dissolved into tears as Madame Giry wrapped her arms around her. Fritz appeared, his face stricken, but he tactfully turned and left when he saw the Girys, leaving them alone with their grief.

"Ah, Signora." André had appeared at Carlotta's elbow and was running his hand distractedly through his hair. "It seems we're in a bit of a pickle. Given that you were helping Miss Daaé learn her music, is there any possibility that, so long as she's indisposed, you might be able to...?"

The poor fool clearly had no idea what was transpiring on the other side of the stage. Carlotta turned her head and regarded him coolly.

"It would be my pleasure," she informed him.

Let the Phantom take his revenge. Let him, like a spoiled child, wreak havoc on all of the rest of them because his darling Christine had been too delicate for the standards of perfection to which he had held her. What did Carlotta care anymore? What did any of it matter?

She stepped out onto the stage at the end of the break, following M. Lefèvre and the other soloists onto the stage. The audience registered some surprise that she was there in Christine's stead, but seemed more intrigued than resentful. Carlotta smiled broadly, a superficial expression of joy that she turned towards the chandelier in challenge. Its lights remained constant.

The chorus and orchestra began the Offertory. Mozart had died in the previous movement, precisely where Christine had collapsed. The music that Carlotta would bring to life onstage, while presentable, lacked the genius of what had come before, and everyone knew it. Still, when her cue came, she stood, took a deep breath, and sang.

 _Sed signifer sanctus Michael  
_ _Repræsentet eas in lucem sanctam..._

Carlotta's inferior voice, armed with an inferior score, painted an inferior picture of an angel leading the dead into the holy light. Somewhere backstage, she knew, Madame Giry would be stoically delivering the news to the Vicomte de Chagny. Christine Daaé would never sing again, and Carlotta was left to fill her shoes — an alternative who would only ever be called as a last resort. Still, she would make do with what skills she had. And so she channelled all of her energy into making this performance the best that she possibly could deliver, pouring every ounce of passion she had into each note that she sang, knowing all along that the papers the next day would include her name as a mere afterthought, if at all.


	6. Day of Tears

_Lacrimosa dies illa_  
_Qua resurget ex favilla_  
_Judicandus homo reus._  
_Huic ergo parce, Deus:_  
_Pie Jesu Domine,_  
_Dona eis requiem._

* * *

Christine Daaé was buried on a rainy Tuesday morning at the Cimetière du Père Lachaise, in the Chagny mausoleum, even though she was not yet a member of the family at the time of her death. The burial was small and private, quite the opposite from Piangi's funeral; Raoul had wanted as little public spectacle as possible to act as witness to his grief. When the doors were closed and the mourners queued to pay their respects to the distraught Vicomte, he took Carlotta's hands in his own and waited a long moment to collect his thoughts and control his tears before he spoke to her.

"She often spoke of you as a great friend, in the months before her death," Raoul finally managed in a choked voice. "I think that you understood something about her as a musician, something that made her truly happy in a way that I never could. Thank you for that."

Carlotta said nothing, only inclined her head beneath her black veil, and then took her leave of the cemetery and moved on as best she could.

For Christine and her ethereal voice finally were gone. The little soubrette was at peace; she no longer had to fret about her torn loyalties to her betrothed and to her masked idol, and to the tantalizing world of glamor and treachery that the latter represented. The rest of them, however, were left to grapple with the burden of her loss. Never again would anyone hear the soaring purity of that silvery voice; never again would anyone be awestruck by the grace of that figure, onstage or off; never again would anyone admire or caress that lovely body. Carlotta's dreams were not infrequently haunted by the impossible beauty of what she had destroyed, lacing the days that followed with bitterness and regret.

And even as Christine dreamed murkily in the eternal sleep of the dead, her myth churned and curdled within the circles of Parisian gossip, until it had expanded beyond the measure of the girl and her voice, and taken on a meaning and longevity of its own. The girl's transcendence from this world to the next had occurred in such a dramatic manner that she was transformed in the public imagination from a being of flesh and blood into an enigmatic fantasy of music and mystery. In the months that followed, Carlotta's name topped the billing for the posters hung outside the Opéra Populaire, but the name whispered behind fans and programs, in the boxes and in corners of the marbled entrance hall, was that of her deceased and now immortal rival.

And so it did not feel like a victory to Carlotta. Even when she returned to the stage, the cheers echoed hollowly around her, the bouquets of roses pricked her thumbs and emitted no fragrance, the bottles of champagne fizzed airily and bore no taste. Victory would have meant simply that Christine Daaé humiliated herself by cracking publicly in front of the crème de la crème of Paris, and retreated into a quiet retirement with her dull aristocrat of a husband. Victory would have meant that Christine Daaé would not have become a martyr for her art, a curiosity, a legend, the talk of the town for months afterwards.

Victory would have meant that Christine Daaé did not outshine and torment Carlotta Giudicelli, even in her death.

And so the orchestra tuned, and the chandeliers were raised, and the curtains rose and fell; and Carlotta sang through it all, sang as best as she knew how, sang so that her audiences roared their approval and yet would hardly remember her name in two decades' time. She smiled fixedly when she appeared for her curtain call, and she curtsied and curtsied and curtsied again, consumed by the resentful realization that, years from now, if she was remembered at all, it would be only as an unremarkable footnote in a great, unfinished masterpiece: the unfinished drama of Christine Daaé and the Phantom of the Opera, that fabled and tormented pair, who expired for their mutual love for one another, and for the music that they created and shared.

It made sense, in a horrible fashion. Even the most talented of sopranos is far easier to destroy than an opera ghost.

* * *

_PARIS — In an unexpected upset for the operatic world, leading soprano Carlotta Giudicelli has been hospitalized as of last night. The prima donna of the Opéra Populaire was found in her apartments almost strangled to death by a lasso, by all appearances of her own doing. When Miss Giudicelli regained consciousness, she immediately fell into a fit of hysterics, claiming to have been visited by a vengeful angel who demanded that she repent for her sins. She then insisted to her caretakers that she was responsible for the mysterious death of the late Miss Christine Daaé._

_Miss Daaé was another former leading soprano at the Opéra Populaire, whose betrothal to the Vicomte de Chagny was cut short by her dramatic death mid-performance several years ago. She_ _was only one of the opera house's personnel to meet an untimely end onstage, as her collapse was preceded within the previous year by the deaths of both stagehand Joseph Buquet and leading tenor Ubaldo Piangi, at the hands of the notorious Phantom of the Opera._

_It is unclear whether or not there is any truth to Miss Giudicelli's insistent confessions. The Sûreté are determining whether it is necessary to open a homicide investigation into Miss Daaé's death. Until such time as she may be taken into custody for the confessed murder of Miss Daaé, Miss Giudicelli will be confined to an asylum, where she will pose no threat to herself or to others._


End file.
